Diablo 2 remaster would require building it from scratch, devs say

We've had two main rumours circulating prior to this year's BlizzCon and as Diablo IV got its announcement, the one about Diablo 2 remaster remained a rumour. Now however, the original game's devs pretty much shot those hopes down for good.

Ironically enough, the news didn't come from BlizzCon but from Path of Exile's ExileCon, where the creators of the Diablo franchise, David Brevik, Max Schaefer and Erich Schaefer, discussed Diablo 2's development.

More specifically, they discussed a particularly unfortunate event where all their assets and source code were "irrevocably, fatally corrupted". It was a proper catastrophe given the stage in which it happened, which was apparently towards the end, and it sent everyone into panic.

What they ended up doing is piecing Diablo 2 back together, both the code and the assets, from the working versions that developers took home to test.

"I had a big chunk of it. Went home, pulled out the hard drive or whatever we did back then. Spent a few days reconstructing it, which ended up working fine, except that we lost all the history. We lost a lot of the assets, art assets", Brevik said.

Unfortunately, this also means that the likelihood of Diablo 2's remaster happening are slim, and even that is probably an understatement given the whole Blizzard situation as of late.

"It would make it very difficult for Blizzard to do a Diablo 2 Remaster because all the assets we used are pretty much gone. They'd have to make them from scratch", Brevik added.

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Diablo IV, logo

So, there you have it, remastering Diablo 2 is pretty much dead in the water, because it would mean Blizzard would need to develop everything from scratch, and given everything they'd started thus far, that's certain to keep its status at 'highly unlikely' for a while.